your silence will not protect you

July…

In this month, I’ve come out to my parents a second time, my parents met my girlfriend, and I also got into my first fight with my girlfriend.

By “coming out” a second time, I just told my parents that I had a girlfriend. My dad handled it better than my mom…not that my mom handled it terribly this time though. My mom basically worried about my safety and my future, meanwhile my dad focused more on the fact that I can tell him anything and that he loves me.

I told my sister at the end of June and she had said she had known for about a month because my girlfriend had referred to me as her girlfriend in a Facebook post awhile ago. My sister was super chill about it.

So…that has been good. My mental health has improved because talking to my family about my girlfriend has been part of my process of building a better relationship with my parents where I actually talk to them about my life. Talking to them about my girlfriend, for me, was the hardest part. It still is because I don’t feel comfortable bringing her up in conversation yet but…they know about her and they met her as my girlfriend.

Which brings me to the other topic I briefly want to discuss. My parents met my girlfriend and that same day, we got into our first fight. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have a “perfect” relationship. We miscommunicate sometimes and we bicker…but nothing thus far has been as bad as it was on the fifteenth. We were both very tense and nervous after she met my parents, which may have contributed to it but ultimately…she was very inconsiderate and I got really upset. It was awesome though because we were able to talk about it and work through it….she went to work a little late the next day to discuss it a little more in the morning too. Afterward, we both felt a little closer to each other because I was able to verbalize my needs, she understood my perspective, and we learned that we are able to work through fights as they come up rather than being passive aggressive or ignoring each other until we “get over it.”

After all that drama, my mind has refocused on the worries and anxieties I had before the semester ended. Those thoughts pertain specifically to my future career/life…feeling inadequate in the present…feeling lonely….and a couple of other negative thoughts. They’ve resurfaced pretty strongly on Monda when I realized my work schedule is dissolving as the summer winds down. Plus I’m going on vacation soon with my family, and I’m incredibly nervous about that too. When I return, I’m going to have a couple of weeks without a schedule before school starts…and school is going to be intense. I think I want to drop a class. It’s my last year and I don’t want to stretch myself too thin and end up doing average work in everything.

So…yes…these thoughts have become the primary cause for my depressed mood now. On one hand, I’m glad I’m sad about stuff that pertains more exclusively to myself rather than the relationship I have with my family (the latter has been mentally destroying me, until recently), but I wish I was more confident in myself and productive so I didn’t feel sad about anything. I’ve been working on planning the rest of my summer though because that will help me calm down and it will help me feel like I have goals and a method for achieving them.